Inside the Star

Feschuk: Website helps fans get in the (good) game

“We’re like your buddy who calls and tells you there’s a great game going on,” says Warren Packard, CEO of Thuuz.com, a site that sends out email and text messages alerting users to the best games in progress.

As a sports fan, perhaps you’ve had this experience: Watching the morning loop of highlights, you see the key turns of what looks like a classic. Maybe it was that Kevin Durant breakout last week, wherein the Oklahoma City Thunder swingman scored his 46th and 47th points on a dying-seconds step-back jumper in a one-point win over Minnesota.

Maybe you said to yourself, “I wish I’d watched that.”

Certainly there are plenty of ways to avoid those pangs of regret, among them a visit to Thuuz.com. The site sends out email and text messages that alert users to the best games in progress in many of the big-time leagues. Using complex mathematical calculations that figure in pace, closeness and novelty, the site ranks games on an “excitement rating” from 0 to 100 — Durant’s 47-point night against the Timberwolves, for instance, was a 100.

“We’re like your buddy who calls and tells you there’s a great game going on,” Warren Packard, the company’s CEO, said in a telephone interview from his base of Palo Alto, Calif. “And we don’t tell you what happens. You can go find out for yourself.”

Packard began planning the site about a year ago. Once a rabid sports fan — he’s originally from Chicago and cheers for the Blackhawks, Bears and Cubs, among others — the venture capitalist had found himself watching fewer and fewer tilts than he would have liked but craved the emotional payoff of truly great battles. An engineer by trade, Packard, along with some friends with expertise in computer programming, set about creating the site. A beta version was ready for last year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and won raves from its network of early adaptors.

Since then, he and his colleagues have configured Thuuz.com to judge the merits of any given game in the NFL, NCAA football, the NBA, NHL and English Premier League soccer. Packard said writing the algorithms that parse the games — a process that crunches available play-by-play data — takes about two months per sport. The Holy Grail of the process, Packard said, was soccer; its low-scoring nature defies simple analysis.

“(But with the play-by-play information that’s available online) we know where the ball is, we know how it was passed, we know who has it, we know what part of the field, and you can really tell the difference between a fast-paced game and a slow-paced game, an offensive game and a defensive game, a close game and a not-so-close game,” Packard said. “It’s really different than looking at the score.”

Packard said Thuuz.com plans to make money from referral fees from the outlets that broadcast games on TV and the Internet; partnerships with major players, he said, are imminent. But there’s plenty of tweaking left to do. While users are currently free to set many parameters for their alerts, Packard said there are plans to make the site even more customizable. One man’s irresistible defensive struggle, after all, is another’s snoozefest.

“We certainly have favoured fast-paced games over slow-paced games (in the current bent of the site). But that’s where the personalization will ultimately play out, where people can drag a slider back and forth and say, ‘Hey, I love defence more than offence,’” said Packard. “Or in hockey, we should have a toggle switch that says, ‘I like fights or I don’t like fights.’ . . . I’m not a big fan of fights, but some people are, and who am I to keep that away from them?”

Neither will Thuuz.com judge you on your taste in teams. Still, if you’re a fan of, say, the Maple Leafs, you wouldn’t likely have been deluged with in-game emails during the NHL season’s opening few months. The Leafs stack up as the sixth-least-exciting team in the NHL according to the site, a ranking based, not on the talent of the roster, but on the quality of games in which the club has partaken.

Toronto’s hockey fans could do worse. Not only are the New Jersey Devils residing in 30th place in the 30-team league, they are also, according to the Thuuz.com rankings, dead last in excitement, rarely engaged in anything resembling a classic.

“The New Jersey Devils are by far the least exciting team in hockey,” Packard said. “They just don’t stack up to the other teams, and they get beaten by large amounts, and they’re just not in the game. The other team that stands out are the Minnesota Wild (29th in the 30-team excitement rankings). They’re 25-19-5, so they’re not bad. They’re probably more like the Seattle Seahawks (who ranked as the second-least-exciting team in the NFL this season, according to Thuuz.com). Whenever they’d win, they’d crush other teams. And whenever they’d lose, they’d get crushed. I’m guessing that’s what’s going on with the Wild.”

In a landscape crowded with content, Packard figures his site helps take the guesswork out of your sports-focused time in front of the screen.

“Now, with the Internet and over-the-top technology, you can get any game at any time,” Packard said. “We want to make sure it’s very easy for the sports fan and enthusiast to find a game they want, and a game that’s worth watching.”

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